Nope writer and director Jordan Peele seems to like horror movies as much as we do. We’re divided on this particular one, but at least we agree we saw something we’d never seen in a movie before. Given our long and storied careers watching movies, that’s quite an accomplishment!
Up next: Prey
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When I need food, I drive past the local grocery at the bottom of my hill and hang a right on the way to the Von’s, a chain supermarket farther down the boulevard. But today I just need bananas and I’m not driving through a half dozen stoplights just for dang bananas. I will, however, drive to the local grocery at the bottom of the hill. So, hello again, local grocery. I haven’t seen you since I realized you don’t carry kale. On this muggy summer weekday afternoon, I’m here for a couple of whatever sad bananas you’ve got in your bin, hopefully more yellow than black.
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Tom Chick and Kelly Wand have spent their lives wrestling with David Cronenberg movies. Why stop now? Suffice it to say, we each bring a lot of baggage to Cronenberg’s latest.
Up next: Nope
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Welcome to the single most extensively researched episode of the Quarter to Three Movie Podcast. Tom Chick and Kelly Wand have pored over the source material for Taika Waititi’s latest Thor and they bring their expertise to bear in an extensive discussion of space vikings, theology, magic weapons, god butchery, kids, and comic books. You have been warned. Speaking of warning you about things, we also saw Black Phone, which we start talking about at the 1-hour, 24-minute mark.
Up next: Crimes of the Future
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Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt co-wrote a script for Thelma, which Trier directed. Now Vogt has written and directed his own script for The Innocents, which has a lot in common with Thelma. We take advantage of the overlap for a twofer podcast on Thelma and The Innocents, and according to Tom Chick, you should watch Thelma first. According to Kelly Wand– Wait, what’s going on? Something’s…off.
Up next: Thor: Love and Thunder
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Tom “Marmoset” Chick and Kelly “Tagline” Wand drive up the onramp, adjust their rear view mirrors, activate their turn signal, and carefully merge onto the highway to the danger zone! But why is Marmoset upset that real F-18s don’t fly like that? And why is Tagline hung up on what became of Kelly McGillis’ character? Can’t they just enjoy their 80s nostalgia like the rest of America? Tune in and find out!
Up next: The Innocents (and Thelma!)
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Tom Chick and Kelly Wand join Jessie Buckley and Rories Kinnear for an unnerving vacation in the English countryside. Are they all in a horror movie, an allegory, both, or neither? And what do we mean when we talk about whether a movie is “scary”? What’s the last movie that scared us? Finally, if you thought the final scene of Men was disturbing, just wait until the synopsis version!
Up next: Top Gun: Maverick
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Remember back when Wizards of the Coast updated Magic the Gathering by changing the hand size of your initial draw? Rather than drawing seven cards, you instead just took your full deck into your hand. It made every match more exciting by simultaneously giving the players more choice and more power. It was the final tweak that Magic the Gathering needed to become the monster success we know today. In fact, if Wizards of the Coast hadn’t made that change, you would probably never have heard of Magic the Gathering. It would have languished in obscurity along with all those other card games with small hand sizes of five, six, or seven cards.
Today, something similar happened to another card game called Back 4 Blood. The developers at Turtle Rock released a major update and now, at last, Back 4 Blood is the game it wants to be. Since I’m a huge fan of the game (scroll down to #3), let me tell you all about it!
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Hmm, something called Interceptor on Netflix. Here we go again, another half-assed action movie for their roster. I’m sure I’ll have completely forgotten about by the time it’s over, if not sooner.
Except that’s not what happened at all.
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We’ve got plenty to say about Sam Raimi’s Marvel movie — including a synopsis featuring three celebrity appearances! — but we should warn you there’s a fair amount of talk about Everything Everywhere All At Once. We couldn’t help ourselves. We’ve been ensorcelled.
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Old World is out today on Steam! Bruce Geryk and I have an ongoing game underway and we’ll be posting an update every ten turns. Here is our starting situation.
One of my fondest early videogame memories is playing the 1988 adaptation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It was just a point-and-click adventure game, but it had a cyberspace to hack into. Once you got in, you could subvert and solve stuff in the point-and-click parts of the game. This interplay between cyberspace and meatspace was my introduction to hacking. Real hacking, not that stuff in Matthew Broderick movies. Here was a way to sneak around guards, get through locked doors, activate switches, and generally get away with stuff I wasn’t supposed to do. Here was stealth gameplay that didn’t mean standing in the dark parts of the level design, memorizing patrol routes, and reloading the game when I got spotted. This was stealth for guys like me fascinated by systems within systems within systems. If I could handle the MFDs in an F-19, by golly, I could upgrade my deck to slip past some ICE!
It’s been an interesting stretch for hacking games, but hacking too often means “doing some minigames”.
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In 2021, I finally came to appreciate the Hitman games, although part of appreciating them is realizing how little they’ve progressed since their latest model. Hitman III is great, to be sure. But it’s also just more levels for Hitman I, so this would easily make my list of top ten games of 2016. When it came to roguelikes, I enjoyed Returnal’s dark sci-fi/horror aesthetic despite my inability to get past Housemarque’s trademark “get good” barrier. Imagine Earth was a smartly focused planetary development game based on head to head competition with other players. It was a realtime boardgame, really. Although unlike a boardgame, it’s hard to read, and not just because the developers thought it would be cute to make you spin a 3D globe instead of look at a map. Remember, developers, 3D globes are never a good idea.
The goofy excesses of Outriders and Necromunda: Hired Gun were my gunplay of choice in 2021. Halo Infinite was a welcome change, focusing on what it does best in a sandbox instead of in corridors (at least until the end), with easily skippable cutscenes and multiplayer I can ignore because if Halo players are mad at it, I’m sure not going to want to play it. Speaking of, I have no intention of buying whatever iPad alternatives Microsoft is pushing, so I wish they would stop saddling games with godawful tablet interfaces in an attempt to get me to buy some dumb hardware. Jamming big square panels onto Age of Empires IV, Forza Horizon 5, and Halo: Infinite just reminds me that these games are published by the same people who thought the Kinect was a good idea.
I was disappointed with Deathloop, a massive step backwards from the Mooncrash DLC for Prey that inspired it. Other notable disappointments include Riftbreaker for being a thrilling wide-open resource-management action-RPG…that had nowhere to go. SGS’ Halls of Montezuma and especially Heia Safari explored fascinating historical crannies wargames rarely visit, but they were undone by the usual wargaming bugbears of bad AIs and worse interfaces. Red Solstice 2: Survivors took the first games’ promising action RPG and turned it into an unsupported multiplayer boondoggle. Guardians of the Galaxy was all the splashly dialogue, the splashier color, and the gameplay of your favorite Marvel movie.
Those are some titles that didn’t make the top ten, despite me spending a fair amount of time with them. Which leads us to the games that did make the list…
The wrong way to watch Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of the 1946 novel Nightmare Alley is by reading the book first. Because then you’ll be one of those tedious “the book was better…!” people. Instead, just watch it as the elaborate period piece it is, none the wiser as to the missed opportunities and pulled punches. In fact, you should probably stop reading here, because I made the mistake of reading the book so this is a review by one of those tedious “the book was better…!” people.
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When David Cronenberg adapted James Ballard’s car crash fetish novel, Crash, he made a movie about a bunch of weirdos I couldn’t possibly understand. Mainly because they seemed like nonsense ideas rather than actual people. Do actual people bond over recreations of famous car crash fatalities? Is there really a shadowy underground network that stages these things and then they all have sex with each other after they’ve evaded the cops? Are Rosanna Arquette’s leg braces supposed to somehow make her more or less hot? And do Canadians really say “penis” and “semen” when they’re doing dirty talk? Watching Crash was like accidentally stumbling into a Reddit group for some fetish that I never knew existed.
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